Reclaim Australia & The Great Aussie Patriot : Shermon Burgess

Untangling the threads of the big ball of resentment that is Reclaim Australia is a depressing game. In addition to expressing otherwise mundane white colonial anxieties, it appears to be animated chiefly by herp derp Islamophobia. It may thus be understood as a rough equivalent to the PEGIDA movement in Germany and a rallying point for the lost legions of the Australian Defence League (ADL) and Patriots Defence League Australia (PDLA). Indeed, the removal of several popular ADL pages on Facebook has meant that the thousands of xenophobes who previously expressed support for right-wing loons like Ralph Cerminara (who reportedly remains in jail) have a new home at Reclaim Australia. Reclaim Australia has also attracted the support of The Usual Suspects on the far right, from neo-Nazis to the semi-pro Islamophobes of Restore Australia (Mike Holt has accepted an invitation to speak at the rally planned for Sydney) and everything in-between.

The most prominent advocate of the rallies is Shermon Burgess, aka ‘The Great Aussie Patriot’. A member of the ADL, Burgess is also the bRanes behind ‘Eureka Brigade’, a God-awful studio project that briefly came to media attention via the songs ‘Border Patrol’ (supporting naval operations against asylum seekers) and ‘ADL Killing Machine’ (see : Far right targets Muslims with hate campaign, Greg Ansley, The New Zealand Herald, April 26, 2014) and his vocal support for killing asylum seekers aka ‘Muslim rapists and terrorists’ (see : Who Are The Australian Defence League?, New Matilda, January 29, 2014).

When he’s not wishing death on asylum seekers, Burgess can also be found expressing fear and hatred of Indigenous peoples — the one group which might be thought to have some grounds for ‘reclaiming Australia’ from its current rulers — describing them as mostly comprised of resentful, drug-addicted “dickheads”:

Burgess is also a fan of neo-Nazi music. In general then, his views express a basic commitment to fascism and White supremacy draped in the Australian flag. Ian Adams:

The common elements of fascism — extreme nationalism, social Darwinism, the leadership principle, elitism, anti-liberalism, anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, intolerance, glorification of war, the supremacy of the state and anti-intellectualism — together form a rather loose doctrine. Fascism emphasises action rather than theory, and fascist theoretical writings are always weak …

It’s therefore appropriate, given also his support for neo-Nazi groupuscule ‘Squadron 88’, that Burgess should be the face of and have assumed chief responsibility for promoting ‘Reclaim Australia’.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2017 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.

Haven’t seen Shermy anywhere.. however the movement will far surpass any wingnut bogan who might be attaching himself to it. The tone of the posters and banners is nothing like you have described.. but then I’ve always believed you live in some booze soaked parallel universe.. I guess it’s getting to you Andy.

Just a bit more Andy… you poor bugger… you simply cannot, due to incapacity of brain function, due in turn to a lack of oxytocin and vasopressin (a typical neurological condition of the Left). But the most glaring of your deficiencies is your baseless assumption that opposition to Islam is by default “Islamo-Phobia”. Using such terminology immediately labels you as of very borderline education, and limited ability to appreciate fundamental issues of faith. In your mental gyrations to understand the Reclaim movement in terms you can digest, you raise up a straw man of past comments and even a video.. woooo.. now that’s impressive.

Nope… Reclaim is in tact not tatters, and Islam will be dealt a decisive polemical blow from which it will not recover. FYI, I dare venture to suggest that you have not the slightest understanding of what Islam is… on what it is based, how it came into being, and why the likes of ISIS exist and more important…. why they act as they do… oh… on that last one you probably have a view… like the clearly retarded US state dept spokes chick Maree Halfwit (Harf) who seems to think the solution to ISIS is… “we have to give them jobs”…

I’m not going to bother to persuade you of the dire consequences of allowing Islam to grow unchallenged in Australia, I’ll leave you to become fresh jihadi meat for sport like happened to the Left in Iran after their revolution that the Left thought would bring ‘them’ to power… I won’t even try to explain what it is about Islam that you (if you were a rational thinker) should be gravely worried about… you are simply not worth it.

A bit personal, however, reasonably well put jdrmot. Andy, I’ve not read you before, your effort above is less than impressive. Hardly a balanced article and certainly not informative or well informed. Either your knowledge about Islam or capacity to write is very limited. Do yourself and your public image a favor, read the Koran, the Sunna and the Hadith, think about it for yourself, then comment on matters of Islam and the West. Look forward to your reply.
Cheers, Rob

1) Your slurs are tedious. Otherwise: Burgess is everywhere promoting the Reclaim Australia rallies. This is not a secret: he is their chief propagandist. That’s why I focus upon his propaganda and attempt to locate his rants and raves within a recent history of similar rants and raves about immigrants, Indigenous peoples, leftists, environmentalists et al, in his capacity both as a member of the Australian Defence League and as an ordinary, run-of-the-mill bigot. The video above is one of many which Burgess has deleted. I believe this to be because they reveal him as both a racist and as someone armed with a determinedly right-wing agenda. Beyond this, he has celebrated the deaths of asylum seekers, encouraged an Australian sailor to murder asylum seekers, and promoted such fun-filled activities as burning down mosques and assaulting Muslims.

This, apparently, is ‘patriotism’: any and all crimes may be justified by wrapping them in a national flag.

2) My characterisation of the Reclaim Australia rallies as ‘Islamophobic’ means that I believe they’re an expression of a deeply-held conviction that Muslims in Australia — regardless of their actual behaviour or opinions — are a dangerous population which must be repressed and, if possible, removed completely.

3) Islam will continue to be practiced after the Reclaim Australia rallies.

4) ISIS/Islamic State/Daesh etc is a product of war and conflict. I think Chomsky hits the nail on the head with regards its origins and development:

The Middle East is engulfed in flames, from Libya to Iraq. There are new jihadi groups. The current focus is on ISIS. What about ISIS and its origins?

There’s an interesting interview that just appeared a couple of days ago with Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer, one of the leading intelligence and mainstream analysts of the Middle East. The title is “The United States Created ISIS.” This is one of the conspiracy theories, the thousands of them that go around the Middle East.

But this is another source: this is right at the heart of the US establishment. He hastens to point out that he doesn’t mean the US decided to put ISIS into existence and then funded it. His point is — and I think it’s accurate — that the US created the background out of which ISIS grew and developed. Part of it was just the standard sledgehammer approach: smash up what you don’t like.

In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq, a major crime. Just this afternoon the British parliament granted the government the authority to bomb Iraq again. The invasion was devastating to Iraq. Iraq had already been virtually destroyed, first of all by the decade-long war with Iran in which, incidentally, Iraq was backed by the US, and then the decade of sanctions.

They were described as “genocidal” by the respected international diplomats who administered them, and both resigned in protest for that reason. They devastated the civilian society, they strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely on him for survival. That’s probably the reason he wasn’t sent on the path of a whole stream of other dictators who were overthrown.

Finally, the US just decided to attack the country in 2003. The attack is compared by many Iraqis to the Mongol invasion of a thousand years earlier. Very destructive. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, millions of other displaced persons, destruction of the archeological richness and wealth of the country back to Sumeria.

One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian divisions. Part of the brilliance of the invasion force and its civilian director, Paul Bremer, was to separate the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict incited by the invasion.

You can see it if you look at Baghdad. If you take a map of Baghdad in, say, 2002, it’s a mixed city: Sunni and Shi’a are living in the same neighborhoods, they’re intermarried. In fact, sometimes they didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shi’a. It’s like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant group or another Protestant group. There were differences but it was not hostile.

In fact, for a couple of years both sides were saying: there will never be Sunni-Shi’a conflicts. We’re too intermingled in the nature of our lives, where we live, and so on. By 2006 there was a raging war. That conflict spread to the whole region. By now, the whole region is being torn apart by Sunni-Shi’a conflicts.

The natural dynamics of a conflict like that is that the most extreme elements begin to take over. They had roots. Their roots are in the major US ally, Saudi Arabia. That’s been the major US ally in the region as long as the US has been seriously involved there, in fact, since the foundation of the Saudi state. It’s kind of a family dictatorship. The reason is it has a huge amount oil.

Britain, before the US, had typically preferred radical Islamism to secular nationalism. And when the US took over, it essentially took the same stand. Radical Islam is centered in Saudi Arabia. It’s the most extremist, radical Islamic state in the world. It makes Iran look like a tolerant, modern country by comparison, and, of course, the secular parts of the Arab Middle East even more so.

It’s not only directed by an extremist version of Islam, the Wahhabi Salafi version, but it’s also a missionary state. So it uses its huge oil resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region. It establishes schools, mosques, clerics, all over the place, from Pakistan to North Africa.

An extremist version of Saudi extremism is the doctrine that was picked up by ISIS. So it grew ideologically out of the most extremist form of Islam, the Saudi version, and the conflicts that were engendered by the US sledgehammer that smashed up Iraq and has now spread everywhere. That’s what Fuller means.

Saudi Arabia not only provides the ideological core that led to the ISIS radical extremism, but it also funds them. Not the Saudi government, but wealthy Saudis, wealthy Kuwaitis, and others provide the funding and the ideological support for these jihadi groups that are springing up all over the place. This attack on the region by the US and Britain is the source, where this thing originates. That’s what Fuller meant by saying the United States created ISIS.

You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more extremist. The most brutal, harshest groups will take over. That’s what happens when violence becomes the means of interaction. It’s almost automatic. That’s true in neighborhoods, it’s true in international affairs. The dynamics are perfectly evident. That’s what’s happening. That’s where ISIS comes from. If they manage to destroy ISIS, they will have something more extreme on their hands.

@Rob:

If there’s some factual inaccuracies in the above, you’ve failed to identify them.

I’m stunned the reclaim movement has a follower who can string a sentence together. The fact that shermon has a third of the likes his old page had before deletion, and the fact that the same twenty odd people seem to be active in all the pages, is a good indication of how many people intend to march against the Constitution and traditional Australian values.

You leftist do-gooder politically correct apologists for the primitive bloodthirsty islamofascist savages who are terrorising the Middle East and threaten ordinary Australian and other western citizens more and more you never mention their despicable disgusting hate rants against Jews and homosexuals their hatred of women, minorities and all western values this country is based upon. Women covered from head to toe like slaves, underage marriages, genital mutilations and honor killings which characterize this so called religion don’t matter to you. You keep on raving and ranting about Australian values and Islamophobia accusing ordinary people for being right wing bigots but the real anti-Semitic anti-democratic bigots are yourselves and your supporters: the red leftist fascists which you represent.

haha daniel, muslims are terrorising the middle east? muslims are fighting terrorism in the middle east. you want to know who the terrorists are? The israelis are the terrorists, the american soldiers are the terrorists, the american government and their saudi puppets are the terrorists. go to the middle east and see whos fighting ISIS, because its not your american boyfriends. its muslims and christians.

I don’t proclaim to be intellectual, but what is it you leftists don’t understand about Muslims openly telling us that their agenda is to take over the world & whoever doesn’t convert must be killed. Read the Koran guys it tells you everything it’s as simple as that, then you’ll see what you are really supporting. Sitting around getting into a slinging match with your fellow countrymen using all that fine english & letter writing skills isn’t going to make your balls bigger. What are you going to do when they hold a knife at your throat and ask you allah or die … piss your pants probably.

Fuck you liberal regards [retards?] you’ll be the first to go should islamisation grip hold and rightly so. The most intolerant ideology spawned is Islam. Intolerance of Christians, Jews, gays, atheists, Hindus, apostates, women, etc. Purveyors of barbaric animal slaughter practice. Serial whingers and state spongers. They will murder you in your beds given the chance.

@daniel4Jesus1, given that Allah is the same deity as worshipped by Christians – a member of which group your very name proclaims you – I thought you might have given Him the courtesy of a capital letter for His name, rather than commit blasphemy according to your own religious beliefs. But I digress.

I would be most interested in which verses of the Koran state that there is a Muslim agenda to take over the world, could you please list them. And, for the edification of those of us less perceptive than yourself, explain why Islam, in the fourteen centuries since it was founded, has thus far failed to achieve this world domination. Your theory as to testicular mass being related to linguistic ability is also most intriguing, but perhaps outside the scope of this discussion.